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[size=18]Looking for Videogames in the Muslim World[/size]

In summer 2006, an Iranian political group called the Union of Islamic Student Societies revealed that it was planning on entering the videogame business. Via the fundamentalist state's semiofficial Fars news agency, a spokesperson for the group announced that its members were developing an as-yet unnamed game revolving around one fictitious Commander Bahman. In the game, American troops kidnap an Iranian nuclear engineer who is traveling through Iraq en route to a Shiite holy shrine in Karbala, and Bahman must then cross the border to battle U.S. Special Forces and rescue the scientist, thereby ensuring the success of Iran's undoubtedly peaceful nuclear energy program.

What's more, the Union announced, the untitled project would be produced in retaliation for a 2005 game called Assault on Iran by American "news gaming" company Kuma, whose Kuma\War series notoriously re-creates recent and historical military events in playable minigame form, ranging from the American raid that killed Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, to John Kerry's Swift boat mission in Vietnam. Rather than draw on past operations, however, Assault on Iran presents a speculative future premise based, Kuma's website explains, on what "our experts believe to be an extremely plausible scenario for delaying or destroying Iran's nuclear arms capabilities without kick-starting World War III." The UISS presented a signed petition to Kuma to have this anti-Iran game removed, and met with no success. Now, its activist strategy has changed to a more pragmatic entrepreneurship: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Kuma, for good measure, issued a subsequent press release that they in turn will create a third game: a sequel to Bahman's adventures, to be played from the American perspective once more.

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